Ontario poultry processor Maple Lodge Farms and a group of Atlantic Canada chicken and turkey producers have signed on to build a new $46 million processing plant in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley.
The partners on Tuesday announced plans to put up their new plant in an industrial park at Kentville, N.S., and expect to be processing chickens and turkeys from the group’s Nova Scotia- and Prince Edward Island-based members by the spring of 2012.
In a release, the partners said the need for a “new, efficient” plant in the region follows the 2007 closure of Maple Leaf Foods’ poultry plant at nearby Canard.
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That closure, the partners said, left about 45 per cent of the two provinces’ chicken farmers without a plant.
And Eastern Protein Foods, a Kentville-based further processor owned by Nova Scotia’s farmer-owned ACA Co-operative, filed for creditor protection and shut down last year.
ACA also announced at that time it would shut down its tray pack operations at its New Minas, N.S. plant, rework that plant’s sales mix, lay off a number of employees and enter talks with Maple Lodge to reach a “long-term solution” for poultry processing in Nova Scotia.
Maple Lodge’s Nadeau Poultry Farm plant at St-Francois-de-Madawaska, N.B. handled much of the affected farmers’ production after Maple Leaf closed its Canard plant. The remainder went to ACA’s New Minas plant.
The new venture, though, is expected to “ensure the long-term viability of the poultry processing industry in Nova Scotia and will benefit the farmers of both Nova Scotia and P.E.I. through ownership in the plant,” Maple Lodge CEO Michael Burrows said in Tuesday’s release.
ACA CEO Ian Blenkharn, chairman of the Nova Scotia Poultry Industry Strategic Planning Committee, said Tuesday the agreement with Maple Lodge “brings stability to both the farmers and the employees in the industry.”
The deal, the partners said, also recognizes the “need to have Nova Scotia chicken and turkey processed in a Nova Scotia plant.”
The 50/50 venture between the processor and farmers is “unique in Canada,” the partners said, as the farmers will commit to ship their production to the new plant and Maple Lodge will provide “much-needed national marketing reach” for the finished product.
Dispute
But it’s not yet known how Maple Lodge’s plans for Kentville will affect its Nadeau processing operations in New Brunswick.
Its St-Francois plant isn’t far from Clair, N.B., where Quebec processor Olymel and chicken producer Groupe Westco still plan to build “Sunnymel,” a $30 million poultry slaughter, cutting and deboning plant from which they said in 2008 they plan to supply the entire Maritime region.
As New Brunswick-based Westco moved its chicken production to Olymel plants in Quebec pending construction of Sunnymel, Nadeau announced layoffs at the St. Francois plant.
The New Brunswick government responded in January this year with a ministerial order designating Nadeau as the only federally-inspected plant for processing of chickens raised in New Brunswick.
Nadeau and Westco are now disputing who would get to market the Westco poultry if Nadeau processes it. And Sunnymel, according to a report in Quebec’s La Terre de Chez Nous in February, continued shipping Westco birds to Quebec anyway.
Brampton, Ont.-based Maple Lodge, billed as the biggest privately-owned poultry processing firm in Canada, also runs a primary/further processing facility at Brampton, a processing site at Etobicoke, Ont. and a hen processing plant at New Market, Va., west of Washington, D.C.
